The Merchant of Venice: Venetian Artistic Perfumes

An Italian artistic perfumery maison founded in 2013 by the Vidal family — Venetian perfumers for over a century — under the umbrella of Mavive SpA. The brand draws deep roots from the history of La Serenissima, translating into fragrance the ancient maritime trade routes that connected Venice to the Orient, Africa, and the Levant: the Mude.

History and philosophy

The Merchant of Venice was established in 2013 as a cultural project as much as a commercial one: Marco Vidal and his family — owners of Mavive SpA, a company founded in Venice with a perfumery tradition spanning more than a century — set out to restore recognition to the role the city of the lagoon played in the birth of European perfumery. The brand is the only fragrance collection officially affiliated with Palazzo Mocenigo, home to the Museum of Perfumery in Venice, opened in partnership with the Fondazione Musei Civici di Venezia.

The guiding thread through every creation is the Mude: the naval trade routes that brought spices, resins, precious oils, and raw materials to Venice from Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. Each fragrance reinterprets this historical heritage through a carefully curated selection of ingredients and the contribution of internationally acclaimed perfumers, among them Yann Vasnier, Marion Costero, Calice Becker, and Olivier Pescheux, collaborators of some of the most important fragrance creation houses in the world.

The style

The Merchant of Venice is defined by compositions that favour oriental, structured floral, and spicy woody families, with frequent use of rare ingredients — saffron, oud, eastern resins, tobacco — alongside Mediterranean raw materials such as Sicilian bergamot and rose. The prevailing format is eau de parfum, with higher concentrations of eau de parfum concentrée in the Murano Exclusive line. In terms of presentation, the flacons draw inspiration from Murano glassmaking and Venetian Gothic architecture, making them collector's pieces as much as perfumes.

• Murano Collection — Six eau de parfum in vibrantly coloured Venetian blown-glass flacons, with gold tassels and book-style cases reproducing the ancient maritime trade routes.
• Murano Exclusive — High-concentration eau de parfum concentrée, with flacons inspired by the palaces and woven textures of Venice, oriented towards oriental and spicy families.
• Nobil Homo — A line built around more masculine profiles, with woody and spicy accords.
• Accordi di Profumo — A collection dedicated to sustainability, crafted with ingredients certified under Givaudan's Sourcing4Good programme.
• La Fenice Collection — A tribute to the Gran Teatro La Fenice in Venice, with flacons in the theatre's signature blue and gold colours.

The best-known products

The catalogue encompasses over a hundred references. Among the fragrances that have helped define the identity of the brand:

• Rosa Moceniga — A floral eau de parfum inspired by the Moceniga rose, a rare variety of Chinese origin cultivated in the gardens of the Mocenigo family at Alvisopoli. Notes of rose over Sicilian bergamot, magnolia, and pink lotus, with a base of amber, vanilla, and white cedar.
• Arabesque — An eau de parfum concentrée from the Murano Exclusive line. An oriental spicy composition with an accord of tobacco, plum, ginger, cinnamon, and cedar, closing on vetiver and musk. The flacon echoes the forms of Palazzo Ca' d'Oro.
• Venetian Blue — A masculine eau de parfum with an oriental woody structure, opening on citrus, with a heart of black pepper and patchouli, and a base of grey amber and musk.
• Queen of the Night — An oriental woody eau de parfum, a tribute to the tradition of Egyptian kyphi. An accord of saffron, cinnamon, incense, sandalwood, and myrrh.
• Moscado — An eau de parfum dedicated to Marco Polo, conceived as a homage to Venice's most celebrated explorer.